There has been a lot of debate in the Citizen lately about whether or not adding fluoride to drinking water has positive or negative health effects. Framing the debate this way, however, obscures the most significant issues: Does the municipal government have the right to medicate forcibly a significant percentage of the city's population against its will? Is it ethical to require many people to ingest a substance that clearly scares them?
Some politicians and medical "experts" in North America and Europe have recently advocated adding lithium to drinking water as a way to make people feel better psychologically. Does this seem absurd? Of course it does, but it's no more absurd than medicating entire populations with sodium fluoride, whether the people want it or not.
City after city in British Columbia, Canada, and the world are rejecting the archaic, paternalistic notion of medicating people against their will. When 97 per cent of BC drinking water is now fluoride free, why does Prince George city council, with such hubris, hold on so stubbornly to such obsolete ideas?
Matt Shaw
Prince George
